Phil 10.10.17

DC submission is tomorrow at 3:00. No word back from Wayne about an AM meeting, so I guess it will be this afternoon?

Read Cindy’s comments. Interesting and perceptive.

More followup on yesterday’s discussions. Here are some strawman screen mockups for the game:

Roughly, the idea is to turn a chat room into a “polarization game”. For phase 1,

Players are randomly chosen from the pool of available players. If we have cross-platform texting, we could handle this in a cross-platform way. Some of the controls from the browser version would have to be implemented in some compatible way. Maybe emoji characters? (Arrows, etc)

There is some scenario that the users discuss.

The game ends when all players agree on an outcome.

Something to evaluate is how much of the discussion should be visible.

Should it “fade out” (as shown), or should there be a searchable history? Parallel Version with History

Should all threads be shown simultaniously

Points are given to participants of a game that unanimously agree

Double points are given to the person who comes up with the agreed-upon outcome

Points are retained across games. Honor, glory, and prizes are awarded the winners.

This means leaderboards and other associated social promotion mechanisms.

Registration page, icon choice, etc

Might as well build in biometrics and ip address tracking so that we can flag suspicious games (E.g. where one person plays all roles)

The initial runs will be in a controlled setting (at UMBC), so we can evaluate more aspects of the player’s experience.

Semi-structured interviews

Surveys (which could be an add-on to the game that pays in points)

Starting to do a deep dive into the Twillo API. Starting with a chat app.

Discussion with the interns about ways they would like to use the system, just to see if there was a strong need to support chat. Here’s the whiteboard:

Some discussion about how long the game would last. If it were quick/real-time-ish, then it could live on a browser. Long term needs push notifications.

Although the user has a login, create anonymous discussants so that a history doesn’t build up that other users can react against

How do the posts get displayed? Time? Score?

Is there feedback on who’s arguments are getting the most votes?

To keep things playable, there may need to be a character cap. More than 140, less than xxx.